QUESTION: What are some of the lessons that have been learned from the many preventative and treatment intervention efforts with students who demonstrate disruptive behaviors?
1. The earlier an intervention is instituted, the more likely it is to be effective.
2. Identifying “high risk” children based on a single marker such as “acting out behaviors” often misidentifies many children and underestimates females. There is a need to use multiple sources of information when identifying students at risk.
3. The factors that place children at risk are multifaceted and are unlikely to be modified by relatively brief, time-limited interventions. Intensive interventions are required for children with multiple high risk factors.
4. Single factor-focused interventions are not likely to be successful. It is important to target multiple risk and protective resources. There are no simple “magic bullet” solutions.
5. Use research-based interventions and make sure that they are correctly implemented.
6. Interventions that are conducted across multiple settings (school, home, community) are more effective than single setting interventions.
7. Interventions should be comprehensive. They should span multiple settings (home/school) and should involve multiple social agents (teachers, parents, peers.)
8. Universal prevention programs alone are generally not of sufficient intensity to have a desirable effect on high-risk children.
9. It is important to combine universal, selected and targeted approaches in multi-component and multi-year interventions in order to have highly positive effects.
10. There is a need to involve prosocial peers as part of the intervention. Interventions that involve only “high risk” children and adolescents may do more harm, and inadvertently, increase the rate of violence.
11. Skills-oriented intervention programs should build in generalization training from the outset and explicitly train for transfer.
12. Combined school and family programs yield more benefits than those programs implemented in isolation from each other.
13. Parent management training is one the most effective interventions with oppositional and conduct disorder children/youth. However, parents of children with Disruptive Behavior Disorders have high “no show” rates. A promising alterative is to conduct an active home-based intervention program. It is important to focus on engagement procedures with parents and possible barriers from the outset and continue it throughout training.
14. Family-focused preventative efforts have a greater impact than intervention strategies that focus on either children or parents.
15. Interventions need to be sensitive to cultural, racial, gender and developmental differences.
16. Interventions should build on participants’ strengths, be collaborative and employ a guided participation model. Interventions should use varied teaching methods.
17. Inadequate parental supervision and lack of parent involvement are strong predictors of future antisocial behavior and delinquency. As a result, parent training is critical. However, parents alone cannot provide supervision to adolescents. Therefore, supervision and involvement are required by caring adults outside the family.
18. Community-based interventions that include policy changes and media campaigns need to be added to family, peer and school components.
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